A new approach examined two aspects of chess skill, long a popular topic in cognitive science. A powerful computer‐chess program calculated the number and magnitude of blunders made by the same 23 grandmasters in hundreds of serious games of slow (“classical”) chess, regular “rapid” chess, and rapid “blindfold” chess, in which opponents transmit moves without ever seeing the actual position. Rapid chess led to substantially more and larger blunders than classical chess. Perhaps more surprisingly, the frequency and magnitude of blunders (...) did not differ in rapid versus blindfold play, despite the additional memory and visualization load imposed by the latter. We discuss the involvement of various cognitive processes in human problem‐solving and expertise, especially with respect to chess. Prior opposing views about the basis of general chess skill have emphasized the dominance of either (a) swift pattern recognition or (b) analyzing ahead, but both seem important and the controversy appears currently unresolvable and perhaps fruitless. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that personal contacts are powerful intermediaries in transmitting job lead information for both job seekers and employers and therefore could contribute to various forms of gender inequality by, for example, providing higher-quality job leads to men than to women. The authors use a unique data set that includes information on the quality and source of individual job leads to explore whether the overall quality of job lead information depends solely on various attributes of recipients' contacts or (...) whether job lead quality is also conditional on gender. These data are based on a diverse sample of professional, technical, and managerial workers from California. Findings indicate that the overall quality of the respondent's job leads is a product of their gender and that of the person providing the lead. In addition, net of a variety of factors, women and men with young children at home receive significantly lower-quality job leads. (shrink)